How many neurons are there in the brain?

Dr. Nauta had a wonderful, dry sense of humor.  One day he came out with this thought:

How many nerve cells are there in the brain?  Well it is generally accepted that there are approximately ten-to-the-tenth (10 billion) neurons in the brain.  This is of course a very large number.

Well Dick Sidman and his group at Children’s Hospital decided to verify this number, and they started by counting under the microscope the smallest neurons in the brain, the granule cells of the cerebellum.  After a long, tedious process, they came up with a number: ten-to-the-eleventh (100 billion) granule cells.

Which leads us to the unusual quandary that there are ten-to-the-tenth neurons in the brain, fully ten-to-the-eleventh of which are cerebellar granule cells!  (He smiles and puffs on his pipe.)

**********************

Where can you find the inferior olive?

Nauta quote from a source I do not remember:

“The inferior olive (a nucleus in the medulla) is something that one might find in an inferior martini!”

***********************

Nauta was a shameless teacher, and a closet ham.  He would use any means at his disposal to help us to learn, whether it was stories, jokes, drawings, cartoons, anything that would help to glue facts and information into our minds.

************************

Looking for the lost keys…

This is one of my favorites:

An old-fashioned cop is walking his beat at night when he comes across a well-dressed man on his hands and knees in the gutter under a streetlight.  He goes up to him and asks him what he’s doing. “I’m looking for my keys!” the man says.  “Oh, let me help you!”  The cop gets down on his hands and knees and begins looking too.  After about a half hour there has been no progress, and the cop asks the man “Exactly where did you drop them?”  The man points to a dark alley about a half a block away and says “Over there. I dropped them when I was coming out of the alleyway.” “Well then why are we looking over here??” asked the cop. “The light’s better.”

This may seem like a silly joke (okay, it is), but it is also a very accurate commentary on the way much scientific research is done.  Answers are sought (and when found trumpeted to the world) to easy questions, for which the methodology is well established.  Hard questions which have no established methodology are pursued much less often, or even simply ignored.  (The Sidman story is a good example of someone bucking this trend.) I call it the “carpetbagger effect”.